Between "Ought" and "Is"

An apparent flaw in the results of our poll might help us to understand a flaw in human nature.

We have a great deal of trouble distinguishing honestly between the people we are and the people we want to be.

Will our readers permit just one more reflection on the Roper survey which was discussed in our last two issues? According to the results of that poll, 3 percent of all respondents attend Mass "five or more times a week," while another 6 percent attend Mass "two to four times" weekly.

Extrapolating from those statistics, we should expect that, on an average weekday in a typical American parish, roughly 4 percent of the registered parishioners would be at Mass. In fact, we suspect, the numbers would be somewhere considerably short of that mark.

There is a problem with our survey data, then. But professional pollsters assure us that the problem was predictable. Polls yield accurate results when they measure human opinions; when they gauge human actions, the results are invariably skewed. Any survey of human behavior is flawed--not because of any weakness in the pollsters' technique, but because of a weakness in human nature.

The problem, it seems, is our remarkable capacity for fooling ourselves. We have a great deal of trouble distinguishing honestly between the people we are and the people we want to be. In the case of the Roper poll, many people apparently felt that they should attend Mass every day, and so they answered that they do attend Mass every day--much as, in surveys of eating habits, overweight people say they are dieting when the truth is that they are only planning a diet.

It is terribly easy to make the mental leap from what ought to be to what is. How many avid golfers firmly believe that their "real" self is the one who hits long drives down the middle of the fairways--although in practice that "real" self rarely puts in an appearance on the tee?

In the realm of opinion, there is no such gap between perceptions and realities. If we want to prefer chocolate over vanilla, then we do prefer chocolate over vanilla. When pollsters ask questions about such matters of opinion, they receive accurate answers. If we think that we should favor a given political candidate, then we do favor him; there is no distinction here between "ought" and "is." And yet whenever we examine our consciences (which, predictably, we do less often than we should) we see the startling difference between what we should have done and what in fact we did.

Why is it so easy to have a firm, clear opinion about a complex political question, on which learned experts disagree, and yet so difficult to have a firm grasp on the observable realities of our own behavior? In Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy asked the same question:

Christians have been taught to be mindful that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Yet from the early days of Christianity, the gnostic heresy has been singing its siren song, bidding us believe that if we could only attain some special status, we could avoid those troublesome manifestations of human weakness. Then, with the reliability of computers, we could "program" ourselves to do what we should.

The appeal of that logic should not be underestimated. One friendly reader has pointed out that in our March issue, Stratford Caldecott made what at the time seemed to be a fanciful prediction: "As the environment degenerates, a whole generation will begin to take seriously the idea of discarding the natural world altogether and emigrating to cyberspace, in a kind of parody of gnostic liberation." Just weeks after those words appeared in print, the members of a California cult committed mass suicide in an misbegotten effort at just such an emigration.

"Know thyself!" Socrates exhorted us, and no Christian spiritual writer could disagree. Prudence--described in the Catechism as "the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it"--has always been numbered among the cardinal virtues. In the spiritual life, the first fruit of prudence is the recognition of our own weakness.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that in our schizophrenic age, prudence has become a forgotten virtue. Even the very meaning of the word is often mistaken, so that popular writers use "prudence" as a synonym for timidity, and cowards cite the demands of "prudence" as an excuse for their sins against fortitude.

There is a place where Catholics can make a frank accounting of their own weaknesses and obtain help in understanding themselves as they are: the confessional. If our poll was accurate regarding how often Catholic receive the sacrament (and again, we suspect the numbers are inflated), the confessional is a place we should visit more frequently.